


Dragonet

by OtherCat



Category: Bleach
Genre: Body Horror, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Kid Fic, Mpreg, Situations in Which is Sucks to Be Swiss Family Robinson Crusoe, Smol Vasto Lordes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24028030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OtherCat/pseuds/OtherCat
Summary: Bloodsport fanfic in which Ichigo’s Inner Dragon has a novel solution to Ichigo being left alone on a world with no intelligent life. The alone part. Not the leaving. That’s outside Spike’s wheelhouse.
Relationships: Kurosaki Ichigo & Kurosaki Shiro
Comments: 15
Kudos: 117





	Dragonet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Bloodsport](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18587980) by [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru). 



He loses track quickly, after the first storm of rage and despair. Ichigo doesn’t wake back up, not into his own head and to his surroundings. Not for days, not for weeks even. Intelligence in a social animal is contraindicated when there is no society for it to interact with. It’s safer not to think, only to act and feel. The Bauplan knows what to do, so it’s easy to let it do what it wants.

What it wants is a territory, a secure den with access to water. It wants to drive away other predators and it wants to hunt. In a general sense, it’s aware of the changing of seasons and anticipates the coming of winter. The Bauplan is not actually designed for the environment it’s found itself in. It can lean hard on the knowledge of the part that is more or less Ichigo, use it to make plans and adapt. Ichigo had survival training for multiple environments, something the part of him that was dragon did not.

The problem was, every time the dragon accessed its greater intelligence, its memories of being Ichigo, something in it, in him, revolted. It remembered it was alone. It remembered there was such a thing as loneliness, and it was a thing that could be fatal. It remembered it had been abandoned, and its thoughts would go strange, full of rage and reckless despair. He would scream and scream, thrash his way through the forest, destroy everything in line of sight until he collapsed with exhaustion. He would forget again, diving deep into a fugue as the dragon shuddered away from raw new instincts, emotion, thoughts.

Eventually, Ichigo grows more lucid. Planning for winter, when you weren’t sure how long that it would last required more advance thought than the autopilot of dragon instinct and behavior. (Did Hollows go into hibernation?) He shores up his new den, finds comfortable bedding, finds out what’s edible for his new body and stocks up on that. The leaves turn, and it gets colder. There are migratory water birds settling on his lake. His body pushes him to eat, but also store food. He builds a smoker for the meat he catches, and a rough hearth for his den.

He forages for edible plants, and weaves crude baskets from water reeds. He scavenges the wreckage of that-bastard-Aizen’s outpost for useful items, or to make new tools. Occasionally, he thinks he catches a hint of his _prey-mate’s_ scent and this alternately makes him feel hopeful, angry, wistful. (Some part of him wishes he’d eaten the arrancar. The rest carefully backs away from that thought and locks the door. Then it goes and hides under its newly tanned fur blankets for a while.)

Winter is…. He doesn’t hibernate exactly. He just sort of slows down and sleeps for longer and longer periods of time, waking only to eat before burrowing back into his furs. Occasionally, when he can’t stand the stink of his den anymore, he crawls out into the freezing air and rolls in the snow. He scrubs his fur blankets with fistfuls of snow and tree needles. It’s during one of these hygiene attempts when he notices something.

Ichigo had already been aware that he was getting bigger, developing a layer of fat over the muscle and bone. He had mostly put it off, thinking that he was just finally filling out after having been starved and experimented on by that-bastard-Aizen. Or even though the “dragon” was otherwise reptilian (except for his hair) he was building a fat reserve for winter. This new thing that he notices is a lump the size of his fist located just to the left of his spine, just above the base of his tail. He hadn’t noticed it until that moment, and it didn’t seem to be impeding his movement. At the same time, his stomach does a slow dip and roll, thinking of tumors. He thinks of cancer and of being sick and alone on an alien planet.

It makes him angry, and that burns a little through the sudden fog of fear. Ichigo remembers (he hadn’t really forgot) he could change modify his shape. Maybe if it was a tumor, if it was cancerous, he could shape it away the way he could change the shape of his horns, assume a battle shape or put it aside. (He doesn’t think about the possibility that this is a cancer that’s the _result_ of his abilities. That whatever experiments had been done, he was an exemplar of whatever Aizen had been trying to achieve. If he’d even been trying to achieve something besides sadistic torture.) He gathers up his blankets and goes back to his den.

He stirs up his fire, adding kindling until he has a good blaze going. He busies himself hanging up his furs to dry, and making a meal for himself, eating, not letting himself think about the possibilities concerning the tumor. This was nothing to panic about, it might not be cancerous. It might just be some new fuckery with this new and unfamiliar body-self. He can shape it away.

Ichigo can’t shape it away. It’s a tough and fibrous mass, rooted along his spine, under his skin, and it won’t budge, resisting his attempts to shape it. He panics a little at this realization, but calms himself down before he tries anything stupid with his sad attempts at flint knapping. Instead, he engages in an inward study of his body, almost meditative as he tried to figure out the nature of this thing.

It was definitely attached to his spine, to his actual nerve tissue. (This is disturbing.) Veins and arteries had been diverted through the mass. (It’s even more disturbing that the immediate word that came to mind is “diverted” as if it had been done deliberately somehow.) Ichigo has the very strong sense that everything is as it should be. (Again, this is very disturbing.) The mass was the right size and shape for its development, and the combination of parts that were him-and-not-him would be a good one even if…

Oh no.

Oh no this was even worse than cancer.

Ichigo doesn’t _want_ to think about what he thinks this might be. He doesn’t _want_ this to be what he thinks this might be. He hadn’t needed the fugue state the dragon could pull him into in a long while, but it’s an easy drop.

Ichigo doesn’t think about what’s happening. He eats and sleeps and when his stores grow low, he starts hunting. His body shapes itself bigger to protect the growing mass. More armor, greater strength and endurance. He knows the when the midpoint of winter, the solstice arrives, and judges the time to spring, roughly. The awareness that the “mass” is a bud, that he’s somehow pregnant, grows with the complexity of the mass. It starts to develop its own nervous and circulatory system, the mass develops a skeleton, muscle tissue, organs surrounded by a caul of the original mass.

(Mom said—and he had vague memories of it—that he’d been sensitive to Karin and Yuzu, before they’d been born. He’d known the moment they’d started feeling and reacting, when they started becoming aware. It’s a little like that, sensing the Hollow. Sensing its feelings and its impressions of movement and its environment within Ichigo is both fascinating and unnerving to him.)

It’s about a month after the solstice, when Shiro is “born.” The Hollow had become more and more active, shifting restlessly along Ichigo’s spine. Ichigo could sense the creature’s restless, impatient feelings. It felt trapped. It felt frightened. It felt hungry and angry. It dreamed, indistinct images that made Ichigo wonder if the creature was somehow seeing through his eyes.

Ichigo is hemming a pair of pants when his back suddenly spasms with pain. Ichigo drops his sewing, falling onto his side with a cry. He can feel the skin on his back _ripple_. This followed by the Hollow moving with sudden violence, panicky and confused. Ichigo, breathless with pain, almost laughs. “You’ve been complaining about being bored.” He groan-laughs. “But now you’re scared because it’s not boring anymore?”

The rippling pain continues, accompanied by waves of fear and the occasional confused struggling of the Hollow. It might have been hours before a final spasm ends with a wet sounding split, and the feeling of something pulling free. The Hollow squalls, full of gut twisting hunger as it pulls free of Ichigo, rips out of its caul. Ichigo snarls back. It’s an enraged sound that has very little of the parental to it. Some part of him took that hunger as a direct threat, and responded with a threat of its own. The Hollow’s fear blares in Ichigo’s head, and feeling sudden guilt, he rolls, trying to see the Hollow, comfort it somehow.

Too late though, all Ichigo sees is a tiny flash of white, skittering out of the den. “No!” Ichigo shouts, and struggles up, despite the flaring pain in his back. It’s gone and Ichigo hurts too much to move. He loses consciousness, aching physically and emotionally.

When he wakes back up, the pain has faded to a dull ache. The mass is completely gone, and the opening has healed over into a wide, flat scar, smoother than the surrounding hide. The Hollow hadn’t returned. It had been pretty mobile, for a baby, and the part of him that was dragon hadn’t seemed to feel overwhelmed with much in the way of parental instinct. Ichigo wasn’t a Hollow though, and even if the Hollow didn’t need help, it was still a baby, and he felt a sense of responsibility for it. It could get hurt, it could get eaten. (It was also the invasive species equivalent of an atomic blast.) 

He goes out hunting for the creature, but doesn’t find it immediately. Its scent is neutral, hard to pick up, and its formerly bright flashes of emotion have become a sort of screening static that makes him hard to pinpoint. It’s hiding from him, and doing so extremely successfully. After a few hours searching for it, he returns to his den.

Ichigo starts leaving out food for the Hollow, and for days, he isn’t sure the Hollow is finding the food, or some other animal is. When he hunts or just goes out for walks he occasionally sees something out of the corner of his vision. Small, white, and indifferently bipedal. “Shiro,” is probably not the most imaginative name, but it’s what comes to mind.

The snow starts to melt before Ichigo can get a good look at the Hollow, before the Hollow lets itself be seen while eating the food Ichigo leaves out for it. It’s small, infant-sized, but not quite infant-shaped. It was a little more developed, more early hominid than baby. It was the color of snow, the color of snow in contrast with something stark black, an intense monochrome that made its eerie gold-on-black eyes stand out. The only thing really infantile about the creature was its face, an eerie duplicate of Ichigo’s own as an infant. “Hey there,” Ichigo says, trying not to startle it.

The creature stares back at him, and sticks its fingers in its mouth. To Ichigo’s surprise, the Hollow echoes him. “Hey there,” it mumbles around its fingers. The fingers come out long enough for the Hollow, for Shiro to stuff more food into his mouth. He doesn’t really seem to chew very often.

“Can you talk?” Ichigo asks, half curious, half humoring what sounded like extremely accurate mimickry.

“No!” The Hollow says, and giggles scratchily. “Nonononononono!”

“Oh, my mistake,” Ichigo says, a laugh bubbling up. “Babies can’t talk.”

Shiro’s vocabulary is about twenty words, some obscure gestures that look eerily like military handsigns, and some vocalizations that sound like down pitched bird chirps and whistles. He strings all of this into nearly comprehensible part-sentences and pantomimes. Shiro’s had a busy, adventurous few weeks for a newborn Hollow and does not seem aware of Ichigo’s guilty twinges as he babbles about snow, mud, climbing a tree, falling out of it again, and failing to catch some kind of prey animal.

Ichigo manages to coax him into the den, and the little creature explores, poking into everything. He’s fascinated by the fire, and has to be swept back from it, with Ichigo’s tail several times. Shiro also tries to get into Ichigo’s larder, obviously wanting more food. “Hey, no,” Ichigo says. “If you’re hungry, you ask,” he says, shooing the Hollow back.

The Hollow skitters back, his hand going into his mouth as he stares up at Ichigo. “Hungry,” he says. “Food?”

“That should be ‘may I have something to eat’ but close enough,” Ichigo says, then has to sweep the Hollow-baby back before he can attach himself to a smoked bird as big as he is. “No, we don’t do that,” Ichigo says. “You let me get you something.”

“Hungry!” That sure was some convincing foot stomping that went with the statement. Ichigo is entirely swayed by this argument.

“You just had something to eat, you can wait,” Ichigo says, and takes down the bird, chopping it into smaller sections to feed the baby Hollow. The baby strips the bones clean, and even eats up the cartilage bits before cracking the bones for the marrow. Full, the Hollow baby flops down on some furs Ichigo lays out for him by the fire. Shiro falls asleep while staring half-hypnotized at the flames. 

The Hollow won’t stay in Ichigo’s den, but becomes extremely fearless about entering it. He more or less follows the rules Ichigo sets down, and is more or less housebroken. Shiro turns up for meals, or when Ichigo goes hunting as spring advances into summer. He grows quickly, and is almost the size of a two year old within two months. (His body shape shifts a bit during this time, becoming more upright, more like a human.)

Ichigo tries to make clothes for Shiro, little shoes, little pants and t-tunics. It’s a struggle to get him into them, and keep them on. (Ichigo remembers Mom telling embarrassing stories about his own streaker period when he was two and sighs. Once she got over the shock, she’d probably think this was hilarious. Thinking of her teasing him about having a streaker for a “son” is surprisingly not painful.)

Near mid-summer Shiro leads Ichigo to _his_ den. Ichigo can’t actually fit inside the little burrow, but he nods with approval at the location, and the concealed entrance and exits. (While wondering why this was so fucking adorable.) With great self-importance Shiro shares his food and shows off his tools and treasures. It was a little like having a tea party or playing house, but also more or less in complete earnest. Ichigo tries to role-model being a good guest while part of him has been reduced to a large pile of goo by the cuteness. 

Shiro’s vocabulary expands rapidly, though his pronunciations of words were slightly off or slurred, combined with chirps and whistles. He starts speaking in short sentences and phrases, which were usually incorporated with what Ichigo was now extremely sure were military handsigns. The little Hollow wasn’t just a strange little not-clone baby; he also had at least some of Ichigo's memories. Shiro would ask questions, or tell rambling little stories about things he couldn’t possibly know. (Shiro’s favorite game involved stomping on little play figures whose names sounded like baby-mispronunciations of some of Ichigo’s least favorite squad mates.)

Ichigo teaches Shiro how to hunt, how to make better tools, how to build shelters, what plants were safe to eat, and which were to be avoided. All of the survival training he’d learned, plus the beginnings of learning how to read and write, count. The Hollow--the kid--soaks up information like a sponge. Ichigo takes Shiro with him on trips to the base, continuing to look for things that might have some use. One particular find is a reader, not too badly damaged, and with a full library. (Most of the books are not kid-appropriate, not even small Hollow-kid appropriate, but there are some classics that Ichigo thinks would be safe to read. With this find, Ichigo reads to Shiro in the evenings.)

Toward fall, there’s a shuttle drop. Ichigo finds that he’s both excited and terrified. He thinks: _rescue!_ He also thinks: _danger!_ He doesn’t know who it is, he doesn’t know how they’d react to his appearance. (No, he definitely knows, especially if whoever dropped was Quincy. Not human, an aberration. He was monster to be studied perhaps, or just put down.) Whoever it is they are not there for him. More likely, they wanted to pick through the remains of Aizen’s base, try to recover anything useful that might have survived. He was possibly in danger, and his kid was in danger if whoever it was discovered that one of Aizen’s “experiments” survived and reproduced.

His first impulse is to just pack up and leave, go deeper into the forest, away from the base, but having a possible enemy at his back was…really not something he wanted. Instead, he scouts from a distance. It’s a small party of six or so individuals…and he knows immediately they aren’t enemies. He knows them. It’s Urahara, one of his father’s friends. He was a scientist and independent contractor for a planetary exploration group, definitely planning on scavenging, and probably looking for Ichigo’s nonexistent remains for his parents. 

Ichigo is still really disinclined to try contacting them. He warns Shiro away from the base, and sticks to watching from a distance.

Shiro is not content with watching from a distance. Ichigo does not realize that Shiro is exploring much too close to the base until he gets a very panicky, wordless cry for help. It’s accompanied by the sense of Shiro’s general location, and that he’s being chased. Ichigo’s heart squeezes tight with fear, and he has to grit his teeth to keep the sudden warning bellow the dragon side wants to make. The dragon might not be particularly parental, but it wasn’t going to let its young be harmed. The bellow rattles in his chest as a growl instead, and he starts running in the direction of Shiro’s cry for help.

He falls on the three crew members attempting to capture the hollow like a hammer. He recognizes Yoruichi, Shinji, and Urahura’s foster son Jinta. They’re armed with nets and dart guns, and they’ve got his kid cornered. Ichigo scatters them with hard, sweeping blows, and balas. He connects with Shinji and Jinta, but Yoruichi dodges him, staring at him in shock, in recognition. He can feel her empathy brush up against his. “Ichigo!”

Ichigo ignores her, grabs Shiro and runs. The little Hollow squalls in a combination of rage and terror, clinging tight to Ichigo. “You are in so much fucking trouble,” Ichigo snarls at his little boy. “Wait til I get you home you little brat. What did you think you were doing?”

The explanation, in words and emotion-filled image-impressions, is sheer curiosity. Shiro had _recognized_ Urahara and his crew, and had wanted to see them, figure out who they were. Shiro hadn’t understood why Ichigo had been so reluctant, so cautious, He had been confident that he wouldn’t be seen. He had been extremely wrong about that. Traps had been set up to catch him, and when those failed, he had been ambushed.

Ichigo runs, not for his den, but for a second location, a blind he’d set up in a tree to hunt ungulates. He sets Shiro down and glares. The kid’s ditched his clothes again, and he’s camouflaged in dirt, with leaves in his hair. “You are grounded for life,” he tells the little Hollow. “I said to stay away from the base. You went anyway. You could’ve been hurt. I was scared.”

“Why?” Shiro asks. “It’s Hatnclogs. Your friendsnfamily. They chased me.” He sounds extremely sulky about the last.

Ichigo sighs and crouches. “They wanted to see what you were, probably,” Ichigo says. “They wanted to study you.”

Shiro looked extremely disgusted. “No study! Bad food and stupid voices. No touching me. Gonna bite all of them.” Handsigns indicated he’d sneak up on them and bite them at night because that’s when they slept.

“No, you’re grounded,” Ichigo says. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“My territory, Iwe drive away!”

Ichigo can’t help the amused snort. “Yeah, your territory. I just freeload hunting all of your prey.”

“Yes. Big and dumb and won’t go away!”

“Mean,” Ichigo says, and reaches out to ruffle the Hollow’s hair. The Hollow makes a little grumbly noise, but butts up under his hand, demanding more pets. Ichigo pulls Shiro into a hug, and the little boy settles in with a little huff. “Grounded forever.” He starts to pick out the bits of leaves and bark.

“No,” Shiro says. “You’re dumb.”

“No you.”

“You!”

For the next few days, Ichigo camps near the hunting blind with Shiro. He keeps a close eye on the crew, which now seems to be involved in searching for them. Urahara and his crew find Ichigo’s den, and eventually Shiro’s. They don’t seem to make any overt attempts to track him or contact him, but Ichigo knows it’s only a matter of time before they locate the blind. He’s torn between going to them and retreating.

It’s Yoruichi who approaches the hunting blind. She’s apparently unarmed, and her hands are in plain view. “Ichigo? I know you’re up there, I just want to talk.”

“We can talk,” Ichigo calls back. He’s holding Shiro, who’s chewing on a bone, and mumbling to himself about biting bad people.

“In person?”

“This is about as in person as you’re going to get right now,” Ichigo says. “Especially after you _set out traps_ for a little kid.” 

“I feel like Urahara for saying this, but the traps were entirely humane,” Yoruichi says.

“And then you went after him with nets and dart guns,” Ichigo says.

“Also humane,” Yoruichi says. “We weren’t sure what he was, how intelligent. He was naked and dirty Ichigo. He didn’t speak.”

“Mad,” Shiro says. Which probably meant “I was scared.” 

“He talks,” Ichigo says. “Also he’s an obnoxious little nudist.”

Yoruichi’s laugh is a little watery. “We’re sorry for frightening him, for frightening you. We wouldn’t have hurt him."

“Would have been really careful about studying him, right?” Ichigo asks, not able to help the anger. Shiro hisses. Ichigo’s inclined to agree.

There was an indrawn breath from Yoruichi. It was a pained sort of noise. “Nothing invasive, nothing that would hurt him, Ichigo.”

“Wouldn’t matter,” Ichigo finds himself saying. “He’d panic. He remembers things.”

“Aizen?” Yoruichi asks. Her voice sounds cold, but under it is a sense of outrage and compassion that makes Ichigo’s eyes sting.

“Yeah,” Ichigo says. He doesn’t bother to clarify how. For now, just let them think Shiro’s a separate, if literally related experiment. “He’s not the only one. It’s why I was avoiding you all until Shiro called for help.”

“Understandable,” Yoruichi says, voice wry. “But you don’t have to avoid us. Your parents will be so relieved you’re alive. They’ll want to hear from you. So will your friends.”

“Let me think about it,” Ichigo says.

Yoruichi agrees and disappears into the trees, heading back toward the base camp.

Ichigo spends most of the night thinking about it. Shiro brings him a brace of prey animals, and they share the kill. He tries to imagine Shiro going to school. Having friends, doing normal little boy things. (That wasn’t fair. Shiro did do little boy things. It’s just that a lot of the little boy things were filtered through the shape and instincts of an indifferently omnivorous predator.) He probably wouldn’t be able to go to school. Not anywhere in the Quincy Empire anyway. He was too visibly nonhuman. (Ichigo is too visibly nonhuman.)

At the same time, it wouldn’t be fair for Shiro. The little boy should have some kind of future, preferably one that didn’t involve being a Stone Age hunter gatherer on a wilderness planet. They couldn’t stay here. He thinks about this for most of the night. “I guess we can do online courses,” Ichigo says as dawn starts to brighten the sky. “Hat n Clogs can figure it out, he’s a sneaky bastard like that.”

“Sneaky bastard,” Shiro echoes, and yawns, showing all his pointy teeth, and the black interior of his mouth.

Ichigo smiles. “Yeah, let’s go talk to him,” he says, and picks up Shiro, settling him behind in a piggy back carry before jumping out of the tree and heading down to the camp.

**Author's Note:**

> Note the First: Vocabulary word of the day: Bauplan (German: "body plan") biology term that essentially means the tendency of an organism to be shaped like that organism. Cats are cat shaped, dogs are dog shaped, horrifying dragon monsters that reproduce through gene theft and budding are shaped like horrifying dragon monsters and so on. 
> 
> Note the Second: It would figure that the first mpreg I ever wrote would be for Bleach. Damn it Askerian.


End file.
